Saturday, April 4, 2009

American polling expert Frank "John Reid will be the next PM" Luntz appeared on the BBC News channel on Friday morning, and indulged in some startling speculation that the outcome of the G20 summit has been so positive for Gordon Brown that he might even consider calling a snap general election. Hmmm. Let's assume for the sake of argument (on past form probably dangerous) that Luntz is correct in predicting Labour are about to see a temporary bounce of 3-4 points in the polls. That means that Brown will effectively be faced with the following two options when weighing up any decision about an election in June -

Option 1 : Relinquish the office of PM almost immediately, having held it for only two years, and hand over to a Tory government with a small majority.Option 2 : Relinquish the office of PM in one year's time, having held it for three years, and hand over to a Tory government with a potentially landslide majority.

Option 1 would undoubtedly be in the best interests of the Labour party, option 2 would undoubtedly be in the best interests of Brown and his place in history. Knowing what we know about Brown's character, which do you think he is most likely to choose?

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

In contrast to the recent findings from YouGov, the latest Scottish sub-sample from ComRes is the third in a row to show the SNP ahead of Labour. However, both parties have lost support, with Labour slipping the furthest. Here are the full figures -

As omitting it earned me a rebuke last time round, I'll revert to my normal disclaimer that Scottish sub-samples of UK-wide polls have huge margins of error and may not be properly weighted.

The UK-wide figures also provide some indirect cheer for the SNP, in the sense that "Brown Bounce III" (if it ever existed) appears to have stalled. The evidence from recent times is that the SNP tend to prosper in Scotland when Labour are struggling across the UK.